A chief task of a diplomat is conveying news to his superiors immediately upon acquiring it and without embellishment. On January 4, 1777, Franklin reported to Congress the initial reactions to the model treaty: The Spanish ambassador was “well-dispos’d towards us,” but as for France, although “the Cry of this Nation is for us … the Court it is thought views an approaching war [with England in consequence of an alliance with the United States] with Reluctance.” Franklin told the South Carolina lawyer John Laurens, twenty-two, who visited him after leaving behind a wife and infant daughter in London, and while on the way home to join the army, that he did not yet know whether France would help the United States in a meaningful way.
The commissioners, going a bit beyond their instructions, promised Vergennes and Aranda that if France and Spain provided a higher level of military aid, the United States would guarantee the integrity of all French and Spanish West Indian possessions and any new ones conquered during a war. They coupled this promise with a threat: Should the Bourbons not quickly come to their aid, “We may possibly, unless some powerful Aid is given us … be so harass’d and put to such immense Expence, as that finally our People will find themselves reduc’d to the Necessity of Ending the War by an Accommodation.”
Vergennes swatted away the overblown American promise and threat, responding to the commissioners, over the signature of Louis XVI: “France and Spain, in allowing the Americans to enjoy all the facilities which they accord to friendly nations in their ports, indicate sufficiently their manner of thinking regarding the united provinces. What more could be required of them?” He accompanied this mild rebuke with a modest reward—the final release of the Amphitrite and another munitions ship, the Mercure, to sail, although only with permission to go to the Caribbean.
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“Let Old England see how they like to have an active enemy at their own door; they have sent fire and sword to ours,” Congress’s Marine Committee had written in its orders to Wickes, whose Reprisal also left a French port on the day that the Amphitrite and Mercure sailed. Wickes was to “proceed on a cruise against our enemies … directly on the coast of England, up the channel.” The capture of merchantmen and of a British naval vessel were the desired outcomes; even more so was sowing alarm among the British populace. The Reprisal quickly seized four merchantmen, and in hand-to-hand combat the crew overcame the crew of the British packet Swallow. The British had expected American vessels to now and then capture merchant ships, but Wickes’s seizure of an official British vessel and his bringing it into a French port was a larger outrage. Stormont wrote to the Admiralty: “Nothing certainly can be more Contrary to the friendship France professes for us, than suffering the Rebels to make this use of Her Ports.”
The ambassador’s strong and detailed protest to Vergennes was based on information stolen for him by a network of spies, among them the American-born Edward Bancroft, thirty-two, who while working for the commissioners copied their correspondence for Great Britain. Since July 1776, Bancroft had been passing information to Stormont and to William Eden, the British intelligence chief in London, enabling them to truthfully boast of knowing the thoughts of the American commissioners before Congress did. Bancroft never considered himself a traitor to America. He initially began turning over materials as a British patriot eager to have the colonies remain British. Blackmailed into continuing, he adopted the methods, manners, and zeal of a professional spy. He sometimes put stolen information in a sealed bottle in a dead drop, a tree in the Tuileries Garden.
Stormont’s purloined information exerted pressure on the commissioners and on Vergennes in the three-handed chess game being played by France, Great Britain, and the United States. Among the pawns were Wickes, his prizes, and his sailors, who included many Frenchmen. But pawns have some freedom of movement, and when the French demanded, in response to British protests, that the Reprisal put to sea and leave French territory, Wickes pumped water into its hold so that it was too leaky to sail, thereby gaining extra time in a French port. The British, having blocked the advance of that pawn, next sent into play a more powerful piece—akin to a chess knight or bishop—dispatching warships to the Bay of Biscay to intercept any American vessels attempting to bring prizes into French ports. The French countered by directing into that bay a similar-strength piece, a squadron of their own, to patrol those waters with instructions to avoid hostilities but not to allow British behavior disrespectful of the French crown.
Franklin, an inveterate chess player who had written a treatise on the game, now recognized that France needed more time to refurbish and renew its military and to persuade Spain to cooperate. He did not push for an immediate alliance. But he did what Deane had not dared do—fueled the French public outcry for alliance with America. He also sought to demonstrate to Vergennes that if France did not make such an alliance an American shift toward Great Britain was still possible, by meeting openly with British emissaries and conspicuously dining with Turgot, Choiseul, and others out of favor with the French court. And while doing all this, he had the time of his life.
Previously Franklin’s favorite period of close friendships and intellectual stimulation had been his time in Edinburgh, to which he traveled several times from London. It was in Scotland that he had received his first honorary doctorate, enabling him thereafter to be referred to as Doctor Franklin, and to converse as equals with philosopher David Hume, economist Adam Smith, geologist James Hutton, and others of the Scottish Enlightenment. In 1777 in Paris, Franklin found the equivalent of those friendships among the philosophes, and something more—attention paid to him by the cultured women who invited him to their salons. Ségur, Lafayette’s perceptive young noble friend, could not help but notice what Franklin and his American colleagues were introducing into upper French society:
Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the … polished and superb dignity of our nobility, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the almost rustic apparel, the plain but firm demeanor, the free and direct language of the envoys, whose antique simplicity … seemed to have introduced within our walls, in the midst of the effeminate and servile refinement of the eighteenth century, some sages contemporary with Plato, or republicans of the age of Cato.
Franklin’s cachet in social circles increased after he moved to Valentinois, the Passy estate of Jacques-Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, fifty, a wealthy trader, investor, and advisor to Vergennes and Louis XVI. Chaumont’s home was also near those of some of Franklin scientist friends as well as of his banker, Ferdinand Grand. Franklin’s and Chaumont’s broadening body types, thinning hair, and omnipresent spectacles made them seem brothers, and they became close friends. Chaumont had had a chance meeting with Stormont in Sartine’s office, in which the always-aggressive ambassador accused the trader of aiding the Americans, and when Chaumont denied it, Stormont showed him intercepted communications documenting that aid. Chaumont then made a confession: As his father lay dying, the son had pledged an “immortal hatred” of the British for having seized and sunk four of the father’s ships in 1755, and had sworn to take revenge.
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Franklin and Deane turned away the great majority of the French officers who continued to besiege them, including one whom Franklin already knew: Achard de Bonvouloir. Since his Philadelphia rendezvous with Franklin, Bonvouloir had been to Canada, been captured and paroled, and now wanted to work for France and America. Bonvouloir later said that Franklin gave him letters of recommendation, but none were ever found. He took ship for Haiti and thence to St. Augustine, where there were many other French army veterans; but since the city was under British rule he was unable to reach the American colonies and eventually returned to Haiti.
The one group of French officers that Franklin did pursue, as had Deane, were the engineers desired by Congress and Washington. Saint-Germain chose and vetted for the insurgents a quartet of graduates of the Royal Engineering School in Mézières, a foursome led by Louis Le Bègue de Presle Duportail,
thirty-three. The ninth child of ten, he was born near Orléans into the family of a lawyer-politician named du Portail. After some shenanigans at the engineering school, a stint in a brig, and much good work in classes, Louis graduated just after the close of the Seven Years’ War, and thereafter made steady progress, although hampered by not being of the upper nobility. By 1776 he had changed his name to Duportail. Testament to his prowess was that the engineering school recommended him to Saint-Germain to write a new set of rules for the engineering corps. Duportail’s new regulations were designed, as he put it, to give the engineers “the military consistence that they ought to have” while reducing the number of fortifications and the amount of officers needed to maintain them, and mandating that future promotions be awarded only on the basis of merit. But he was also an apostate to the Mézières doctrine that engineers must master and stick to the craft of drawing plans for fortifications. For Duportail “construction of fortifications proper was a distinctly subsidiary function of the art of fortification, and military engineers should not waste their time paying too much attention to it,” as a historian of engineering in the period puts it. Duportail’s heresy was advocating that all engineers should aim to provide strategic counsel to the top command.
Duportail suggested to Franklin that for secrecy they communicate in Latin, since “it is certain that if my going to America is noised abroad, neither I nor any officer of the Corps will be permitted to leave France.” Franklin, self-taught in Latin, was not comfortable in the language, so they stuck to French. Duportail, with the express backing of Saint-Germain, asked to be designated as head of America’s engineering corps and sought a guarantee that in America he would be advanced in rank beyond the one he held in France, and to be free to return home when winter shut down the year’s campaign. Negotiations continued until Duportail announced that he had just been honored with appointment as a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Corps of Engineers, a group that previously had consisted only of the upper nobility. His three subordinates, all fellow Mézières graduates, had also been taken into the corps, although at lower ranks, in the expectation of their being of great service to America.
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Once at sea, the Amphitrite’s captain needed to wiggle out of what he had pledged to the crown: Under pain of imprisonment for disobedience, to sail only for Saint-Domingue. Coudray had the military passengers aboard write the captain an exculpatory letter insisting that it was necessary to head for Boston. In March 1777 the captain informed the crew of this change in plans, cushioning it by announcing that they would receive extra pay for entering a war zone.
Lafayette was having more trouble than the Amphitrite had in arranging his rendezvous in America. He had predicted to Franklin and Deane that his departure for America would cause a ruckus, but neither he nor they were prepared for its magnitude. The opera-worthy tale of his transit to America involved midnight departures, permissions sought and denied, Lafayette’s dizzily hectic weeks in London at the request of the new French ambassador there (a Noailles, his wife’s uncle) that included being introduced to George III, narrow escapes, an initial sailing, an attack of conscience while at sea, a costly return, an order for the young man to be prevented from leaving the country—not quite a lettre de cachet, which enabled a government minister to imprison a man for a potential crime, but close enough—and an eventual escape, incognito and in defiance of Louis XVI’s explicit orders, culminating in a grand sailing from a port in Spain with de Kalb and others, all in the eyes of a French populace that approved of Lafayette’s passion and heedlessness. An irked Vergennes told a friend—who told Stormont, who put it in writing to London—that Lafayette’s embarking was “unaccountable folly,” and if the young man were to be caught at sea by the British and roughly treated that would be an appropriate response to his folly. “On the whole,” Lafayette wrote to Carmichael, “this affair has produced the éclat I desired, and now that everyone’s eyes are on us, I shall try to be worthy of that celebrity.”
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All three of the initial cluster of Beaumarchais-Deane ships—there would eventually be ten altogether—managed to cross the Atlantic. One was stopped by the British near the American coast and had its cargo confiscated. The Mercure made Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in mid-March, but its hold was not full. So when the heavily loaded Amphitrite reached Portsmouth at the end of April 1777, there were huzzahs. It brought over more cannon than the Continental army had ever previously had available for battle, as well as pickaxes, tents, and other war matériel so broadly needed that the cache was divided and sections of it dispatched to many of the far-flung Continental armies and depots. Major General William Heath, who spoke French, soon wrote Washington that Portsmouth was “swarming” with French officers, two of whom, de la Balme and Coudray, were “much superior to any that I have as yet seen.” Heath also reported exasperation at having to advance money to them, as well as to Conway and Fleury, for journeys to Philadelphia; but on the whole he expressed exultation and relief, for he knew, as did Washington, that with these munitions America’s forces would be well-enough stocked for the 1777 campaign season.
And that was only part of it. Beaumarchais would later boast that he had leveraged the French and Spanish 2 million livres into 5.6 million, and with it rented ships carrying 300,000 barrels of gunpowder, 30,000 muskets, 3,000 tents, 200 cannons, 100,000 musket balls, clothing for 30,000 troops—and used the remainder to pay the expenses of transporting and victualing thirty officers during their three months in transit.
“The arrival [in America] of these great succours,” Stormont wrote home from Paris upon learning of the Portsmouth welcome of the Amphitrite, “greater I believe than ever were furnished by a nation pretending to be at Peace, has raised the spirits of the Rebels and of their numerous Well-Wishers here.”
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The Marquis Charles-Armand Tuffin de la Rouërie had embarked on the Morris with his baggage, servants, and a full load of munitions. The ship made a relatively swift crossing but within sight of the Delaware River was captured by the British. The marquis managed to escape, although not with his baggage. He was soon interacting with Congress, where he proved to be as diplomatic and ingratiating as his encomiums said that he was brave and resourceful. He offered to serve without pay, and to be called Colonel Armand. His initial meeting with Washington had the commander praising his good sense and modesty. Placed in a unit of non-English speakers, most of them German-born, after an initial skirmish he was given command. In Armand’s first major encounter with the enemy his unit lost thirty of eighty men; nonetheless the senior Continental army officers were pleased with his leadership. There was a palpable need for his sort of experienced, battle-tested midlevel commander able to guide the actions of regulars and militia who had had little or no combat experience.
De la Balme, the cavalry expert, in Boston presented copies of his books to John Adams, who was as impressed as Heath had been. But Washington believed the American terrain unsuited to cavalry, and he already had a small detail of dragoons serving as his personal guard and as occasional scouts. Placing that unit under de la Balme’s command would cause problems. Congress believed they found the ideal niche for de la Balme: inspector general of cavalry.
In an uprising in which democratization is an integral aspect of the proposed solution to political governance, any assertion of privilege will meet resistance. Coudray, Conway, and Borre (who had managed to cross aboard the Mercure) asserted such privilege upon arriving in Philadelphia, demanding that Congress honor their agreements, which would rank them as high in the American army as Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, and John Sullivan, the field leaders during the past two years. Those generals warned Congress that if they were to be passed over and the French given high commands, they would resign and go home. Washington supported their protests. “Altho no one will dispute the right of Congress to make appointments,” he wrote to his fellow Virginian Richard Henry Lee, “every person will assume the previledge
of judging of the propriety of them; & good policy, in my opinion, forbids the disgusting a whole Corps to gratifie the pride of an Individual; for it is by the zeal & activity of our own People that the cause must be supported, and not by a few hungry adventurers.… I am haunted and teazed to death by the importunity of some [of the French] & dissatisfaction of others.” Lee understood Washington’s distress but told him, “The strongest obligations rest upon us (tho’ the inconvenience is great) to make good engagements,” even though Lee believed that earlier French arrivals had tricked the delegates by displaying “sagacity enough quickly to discern our wants, and professing competency,” and so “were too quickly believed.”
To help Washington deal with the situation, Congress passed an edict that allowed him to determine whether foreign officers commissioned by Congress were useful, and to dismiss those he deemed unworthy. Washington accordingly refused to award field commands to French officers that were commensurate with the elevated positions given to them by Congress, unless and until the officers had proved themselves in battle in America. Thus Borre and Conway, nominally brigadier generals, Washington assigned to the tasks of colonels. The wisdom of doing so was soon borne out. In camp the junior officers accused Conway of conduct unbecoming an officer and of abusing the troops. Conway’s superior, Major General William Alexander, Lord Stirling, wanted him punished. Washington declined to censure Conway or to break him in rank, attributing Conway’s transgressions to his unfamiliarity with American military rules and expectations. Washington excused Conway’s bad behavior because he knew that he would need every experienced field leader he could muster in what he anticipated would be a large and perhaps even a decisive battle against the considerable forces of General Sir William Howe.
How the French Saved America Page 7
